While Rosenfeld may have been Canada's most famous female athlete in her day, she still needed to work at the Patterson Chocolate Factory to pay her bills. As her sister commented, "If Bobbie were alive today she'd be a millionaire, with all the endorsements athletes have now. Instead she had lots of hatboxes. Not luggage. Hatboxes.

Rosenfeld looked back on this fact with humor. "We gals were babes in the wood then and clung to that old cliche about sports for sports sake," she wrote in 1950. "After I came back from the Olympics, Dr. Saul Simon decided to arrange a series of exhibition races.... My first race was in my hometown of Barrie. When I arrived...the officials were most apologetic. No girl racers had answered the challenge, but would I run against the boys? I did, and won with the help of a three-yard handicap. My prize—a lamp shade and a yard of moire ribbon. I shuddered at the thought of collecting, maybe, another half dozen lamp shades and yards more of moire, so right there and then I persuaded the doc to cancel the rest of the tour."